[Pkg-pascal-devel] Castle Game Engine 7.0-alpha.1 release, view3dscene 4.0.0

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Hello,

I have just released an alpha version of Castle Game Engine:
7.0-alpha.1 . Official news on https://castle-engine.io/wp/ will
follow, but the release is done on GitHub already:

  https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-engine/releases/tag/v7.0-alpha.1

We talked about it at MDCO #2 (in November 2020,
https://mdco2.mini.debconf.org/ ). The goal was to include this new
CGE version in Debian, before Debian freeze, so that it can reach next
Debian stable (and hopefully be even updated to just 7.0, final,
non-alpha). Currently Debian includes CGE 6.4, which is now very old,
and we have made a ton of new features since then. We have a huge
delay since last 6.4 release, as some of the new features (editor,
glTF) necessitated various related changes to make everything in "top
shape".

I realize that I am terribly very late with doing even this
7.0-alpha.1 release. If it is too late to package it before Debian
freeze, so be it, ignore me :) I had ample time to prepare this, and
each week I was postponing it "one week further, just to finish this 1
additional feature first" :)

If it is not too late to include this in Debian, then great! I want to
help packaging this as much as I can.

The release is on
https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-engine/releases/tag/v7.0-alpha.1
. It corresponds just to the GIT tag v7.0-alpha.1 .

The main new feature of packaging will undoubtedly be the CGE editor,
which is a Lazarus LCL application inside tools/castle-editor .
There's an LPI file inside tools/castle-editor/code/castle_editor.lpi
so it can be compiled like this:

  lazbuild packages/castle_base.lpk
  lazbuild packages/castle_components.lpk
  lazbuild tools/castle-editor/code/castle_editor.lpi
  mv tools/castle-editor/castle-editor /usr/bin/ # install it system-wide

We also feature a few command-line tools, as in previous engine
versions. The most important is the build tool called just
"castle-engine". These can be build e.g. using "make tools" in the
top-level directory, and a CGE package in Debian should just install
them system-wide. There's no drastic change here with respect to CGE
6.4.

The editor also integrates with 2 other CGE tools, developed in
separate repositories:

- Editor calls view3dscene when user double-clicks on 3D and 2D scenes
(glTF files etc.). view3dscene is already provided by Debian's other
package. New view3dscene release 4.0.0, based on CGE 7.0-alpha.1, is
on

    https://github.com/castle-engine/view3dscene/releases/tag/v4.0.0

- Editor calls castle-view-image (
https://castle-engine.io/castle-view-image.php ) when user
double-clicks on an image. If Debian is interested in packaging
castle-view-image too, then you can take the latest version 2.0.0
(based on CGE 7.0-alpha.1) from

    https://github.com/castle-engine/castle-view-image/releases/tag/v2.0.0

    But this one's not critical. I would be cool if Debian ship's a
modified CGE editor that checkes for "castle-view-image" existence and
falls back on the system default image viewer, I can provide a trivial
patch for this.

The dependencies of the tools didn't change much. We no longer depend
on libgtkglext or libGLU. We remain "normal" applications using OpenGL
and GTK 2 (by default on Linux).

Other than that, CGE is a set of Pascal units, just as before. Our
build tool (castle-engine) is just a wrapper that calls FPC with
proper options, our editor (castle-editor) is just a GUI to design
games that calls the build tool underneath to build the project.

Regards,
Michalis